When a risky decision involves both skill and chance, success or failure is a signal of the decision maker's skill. Adopting standard models from the career concerns literature, we show that a rational desire to avoid looking unskilled may help explain several anomalies associated with prospect...

Bargaining over two issues as a bundle permits credible cheap talk about their relative importance even when interests are directly opposed on each issue. The resulting communication gains can exceed the gains from bundling previously identified in the monopoly pricing literature. -- bundling ;...

Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...